Category: Uncategorized

By Jay Greenspan

What are we to make of the Demon Barber’s best gal, Mrs. Lovett? We can certainly respect her entrepreneurial spirit and her unflinching self-assessment of her culinary skills. But beyond that, it’s hard to know how exactly we should feel about this enabler of a serial murderer.

I think a credible argument could be made that she’s simply despicable, lacking any sense of morality whatsoever. After all, she is the one who has the “bright idea” to make unwitting cannibals of her customers. But there are also moments when she seems pitiable in ways that evoke sympathy. When she speaks of her simple hopes — for a companion, for some leisure time on the beach — your heart goes out to someone whose life is lonely and joyless.

This range of appropriate emotional reactions to Mrs. Lovett is harnessed by the actresses who bring this character to life. Happily, the two most famous Mrs. Lovetts — Angela Lansbery and Patti Lupone — offer very different takes.

Establishing the Character

Sweeney Todd needs levity, a relief from the gloom, and from her first moments on stage, Mrs. Lovett supplies great comedy by singing The Worst Pies in London. Angela Lansbery’s comedic chops are fantastic. As you watch her rendition of the song, focus on her Kramer-esque physical comedy as she chases an imaginary bug down the counter. Also, listen to how she bends the sustained note when singing “Did you come her for a pie, sir? ” We know immediately that Mrs. Lovett might elicit a smile or provoke a laugh when she’s on stage.

;

Contrast this with Patti Lupone’s interpretation. Lupone sells the punch lines with aplomb, but this Mrs. Lovett isn’t goofy or comically demonstrative. Look at how she treats the dough when singing, “With the price of meat what it is….” There’s a rage within her. And she seems positively angry and jealous of Mrs. Moody’s feline-based success.

Before moving further into the play, I’ll take a moment to admire Sondheim’s brilliance in this song. He manages to cram a number of laughs while still offering plenty of exposition. Then at the end he plainly raises the questions I’m focusing on in this post: Just how much should we “Pity a woman alone/With limited wind” when “Times is hard/Times is hard?”

Thank you, Mr. Sondheim. Thank you very much.

Extolling Patience

If you told me I could listen to only one song from Sweeney for the rest of my life, I think I’d pick Wait. I adore how, with the altering of just a few words and the changing of a few chords, the song would appropriate for a Mary Poppins sequel:

Don’t you know,
Silly man,
Half the fun is to
Plan the plan?
All good things come to
Those who can
Wait.

Lansbery’s Wait is maternal and sincere. You feel in her performance that Lovett is desperate for someone to care for and nurture. Her desire to find the flower that will make his killing chamber less austere may be little crazy, but her concern is genuine.

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be video of Lupone’s reprisal of Mrs. Lovett from the 2004 Broadway staging, so we can’t see her acting. But we can hear plenty in the original cast recording of the song.

In this version, particularly in the second half, you’re hearing a more manipulative Mrs. Lovett. When Todd asks about the judge, her concern turns to her deceptions. She replies:

“Can’t you think of nothing else? Always broodin’ away
on yer wrongs what happened heaven knows how many
years ago!”

At this point she turns angry and a little desperate. If Todd is entirely obsessed with the past he’ll be of essentially no help to her at all. Eventually he’ll discover that the mad woman of Fleet Street is actually his wife.

Finishing The Character
In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim call Lovett the “true villain” of Sweeney Todd. And that may be the case. She gleefully sends many innocent men to the meat grinder. But great characters can and should be interpreted by directors, actresses, and audiences. There’s no reason you couldn’t find a little love for this former resident of Fleet Street.

By Marisa Suescun

Let’s start with this, because it’s so charming. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s shoutout to Sondheim during his Tony-acceptance speech for In the Heights, sandwiched between his cast and crew thank you’s and a waving of the Puerto Rican flag:

“Look, Mr. Sondheim! I made a hat! Where there never was a hat! And it’s a Latin hat at that!” The reference was apt – Heights was Miranda’s first hat to hang on Broadway, and it was shiny and appealing, the winsome work of a bright newcomer, a singular talent even.

For me, though, the accolade of the groundbreaking, of “where there never was a hat” – rarified musical theater territory that Sondheim has trafficked more than once in his career – belongs to Miranda’s second show, which Jay and I saw last month at Joe’s Public Theater.

Hamilton.

Where do I start? There aren’t any real clips of the show yet, no cast recording. There is this, from the White House in 2009, which turned into the opening number of Hamilton:

There’s a Sondheimian storytelling bravura to this opening number, which covers the first 17 years of Alexander Hamilton’s life in just over 3 minutes, as told by the “damn fool that shot him.” Miranda shares Sondheim’s faculty and delight in rendering a mythic character through unconventional means. In this case, the unconventional comes not only from telling Hamilton’s story as a hip hop story – not only from applying contemporary language and composition to centuries-old history, not only from casting to play the white men of our history books a multi-racial company whose roots reflect our country’s actual founding story – but from giving Aaron Burr the first word, and Hamilton and Burr the central love story. This is the brilliant trope. The innovation in Hamilton, like that of most groundbreaking theater, is ultimately rooted in character, relationship, and plot. Not actually making something new, but looking at something familiar from a new angle or leading it down a new path. Or placing it somewhere unexpected. Where there never was a hat.

Miranda says the show is about a man who writes his way out, who makes his mark with words, whose brilliance is astonishing and ultimately historic. He speaks of the Hamilton’s embodiment of “the word’s ability to make a difference,” and you can hear Sondheim’s influence there.

Sondheim says art is teaching, and Miranda, it seems to me, is a history teacher of sorts here, as deeply vigilant to historical accuracy as he is to fashioning something new out of it. Not that Miranda upends every tradition; though we get to hear Burr’s oft-untold version of the story, and though people of color tell the story and the white man is relegated to the comic sidenote, in the form of King George at his empire’s decline (singing hilarious British pop), we don’t really hear a female voice at the center of things.

The women’s voices in the show are distinctive, at times fierce even, but decidedly ancillary. Hamilton ends with his wife Eliza in the spotlight at center stage, a nod to her character that I both appreciate and didn’t see coming (read: didn’t feel was earned). We are introduced to Eliza through “Helpless,” and though we kind of know that she’s anything but, though we wait for the moment where we see that she, too, writes her own story, and though that moment does inevitably come – nonetheless, a redemptive moment does not a central character make. Eliza is the one who fell in love with greatness, the supportive stalwart in the shadows. Hers is a secondary character trajectory, and “Helpless” a secondary character’s introduction. Hamilton and Burr are where it’s at.

This is not a critique (outside the critique of the unearned ending, when so much else was earned). Hamilton is a show about the founding fathers, and its unbridled masculinity is part of its pleasure. When Thomas Jefferson says to the audience, after a moving domestic scene, “Let’s get back to politics,” I am more than happy to oblige. And I trust it to be historically accurate that women were not “in the room where it happens,” as Burr longs to be.

I sense intent in the traditionalism of Miranda’s themes here. Miranda has a way of being at once edgy and comforting, pushing the envelope while limning the familiar. He sets up something cutting edge and contemporary, and then tells everyone in attendance they’re in on it, they’re the cool kids who get it, when in fact what he puts out is wonderfully, intelligently mass-appeal. This is not Sunday in the Park with George. Miranda’s lyrics and, in Hamilton, the ideas he explores, have a Sondheimian density, and yet, unlike “Sunday,” Hamilton’s opening number is a finger-snapper from beat two, and the story accessible to anyone who grew up in this country, or anyone who is part of our immigrant narrative, or anyone who is a striver in our land of inequitable opportunity. It’s ultimately feel-good theater, a song and dance show reimagined, at once critical and hopeful, progressive in form and conventional in theme, and to that last point, Miranda works in the golden-age tradition of Sondheim’s first mentor, who transformed musical theater storytelling, the great Oscar Hammerstein.

Or Webber. Oscar Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber? Funny how things are unconventional, until they’re conventional. Jesus Christ, Superstar: a classic Biblical story, told through rock songs. Similarly “edgy” for its time, easy-to-swallow, and undeniably excellent. Appropriating genres new to musical theater (in Webber’s case, not just rock, but opera’s recitative dialogue) in ways that exhilarated audiences without the bewilderment that often accompanies witnessing the utterly avant-garde.

This isn’t blasphemy to draw this comparison (despite the fact that Second Stage, which produced Miranda’s first incarnation of In the Heights, used to have a set of rules printed on show programs that included [and I paraphrase, from untrustworthy memory], “No smoking, no talking during the show, and absolutely NO ALW.”); Miranda spent Easter weekend tweeting Superstar lines in response to fan questions between shows. I spent Easter Saturday making cuzuppe with my mother and daughter, while Jesus Christ Superstar played from her kitchen speakers. Don’t you know, everything’s all right now?

I almost auditioned for In the Heights. Not the Broadway version, obviously. The original incarnation of that show, which I think was called In Washington Heights, hatched at Wesleyan University when I was a senior and Miranda was a sophomore. I didn’t know him, but I heard his casting call to the student body via a “bulletin broadcast,” a sort of voicemail of campuswide announcements (some relic of the past century). The audition announcement was funny and charming and entirely sung through, and I thought, “That would be fun to audition for.” True to my form in college, I signed up for an audition slot scheduled between a campus newspaper staff meeting and an orchestra rehearsal, told no one, and secretly prepared an audition song. Highly uncharacteristic of me in college (though, perhaps, more characteristic of me now), I didn’t show up for the audition. It is one of the very few things I regret about my college career. I do think it would have been fun to audition for.

As it was, I stood in line and couldn’t get into the ‘92 Theater to see the show, but I remember the buzz on campus, the heady talk of Broadway. Eight years later when I saw it in New York, I thought, I almost witnessed this at its birth. How lucky.

I feel that same sense of luck, and wistful inspiration, at seeing Hamilton in its premiere.

I have decided that Miranda’s career is one I’ll follow closely. I hope to see each of his shows the way I saw Hamilton, in its first bloom in an intimate venue, and though I know not all of his works will be masterworks, like not all of Sondheim’s are, I hope all of them will contain some of the incandescent brilliance that suffuses Hamilton.

By Jay Greenspan

What are we to make of the Demon Barber’s best gal, Mrs. Lovett? We can certainly respect her entrepreneurial spirit and her unflinching self-assessment of her culinary skills. But beyond that, it’s hard to know how exactly we should feel about this enabler of a serial murderer.

I think a credible argument could be made that she’s simply despicable, lacking any sense of morality whatsoever. After all, she is the one who has the “bright idea” to make unwitting cannibals of her customers. But there are also moments when she seems pitiable in ways that evoke sympathy. When she speaks of her simple hopes — for a companion, for some leisure time on the beach — your heart goes out to someone whose life is lonely and joyless.

This range of appropriate emotional reactions to Mrs. Lovett is harnessed by the actresses who bring this character to life. Happily, the two most famous Mrs. Lovetts — Angela Lansbery and Patti Lupone — offer very different takes.

Establishing the Character

Sweeney Todd needs levity, a relief from the gloom, and from her first moments on stage, Mrs. Lovett supplies great comedy by singing The Worst Pies in London. Angela Lansbery’s comedic chops are fantastic. As you watch her rendition of the song, focus on her Kramer-esque physical comedy as she chases an imaginary bug down the counter. Also, listen to how she bends the sustained note when singing “Did you come her for a pie, sir? ” We know immediately that Mrs. Lovett might elicit a smile or provoke a laugh when she’s on stage.

;

Contrast this with Patti Lupone’s interpretation. Lupone sells the punch lines with aplomb, but this Mrs. Lovett isn’t goofy or comically demonstrative. Look at how she treats the dough when singing, “With the price of meat what it is….” There’s a rage within her. And she seems positively angry and jealous of Mrs. Moody’s feline-based success.

Before moving further into the play, I’ll take a moment to admire Sondheim’s brilliance in this song. He manages to cram a number of laughs while still offering plenty of exposition. Then at the end he plainly raises the questions I’m focusing on in this post: Just how much should we “Pity a woman alone/With limited wind” when “Times is hard/Times is hard?”

Thank you, Mr. Sondheim. Thank you very much.

Extolling Patience

If you told me I could listen to only one song from Sweeney for the rest of my life, I think I’d pick Wait. I adore how, with the altering of just a few words and the changing of a few chords, the song would appropriate for a Mary Poppins sequel:

Don’t you know,
Silly man,
Half the fun is to
Plan the plan?
All good things come to
Those who can
Wait.

Lansbery’s Wait is maternal and sincere. You feel in her performance that Lovett is desperate for someone to care for and nurture. Her desire to find the flower that will make his killing chamber less austere may be little crazy, but her concern is genuine.

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be video of Lupone’s reprisal of Mrs. Lovett from the 2004 Broadway staging, so we can’t see her acting. But we can hear plenty in the original cast recording of the song.

In this version, particularly in the second half, you’re hearing a more manipulative Mrs. Lovett. When Todd asks about the judge, her concern turns to her deceptions. She replies:

“Can’t you think of nothing else? Always broodin’ away
on yer wrongs what happened heaven knows how many
years ago!”

At this point she turns angry and a little desperate. If Todd is entirely obsessed with the past he’ll be of essentially no help to her at all. Eventually he’ll discover that the mad woman of Fleet Street is actually his wife.

Finishing The Character
In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim call Lovett the “true villain” of Sweeney Todd. And that may be the case. She gleefully sends many innocent men to the meat grinder. But great characters can and should be interpreted by directors, actresses, and audiences. There’s no reason you couldn’t find a little love for this former resident of Fleet Street.

By Marisa Suescun

Sweeney Todd, being as it is a tale of mass murder, is not an obvious vehicle for love songs. The relationships in Sweeney have a symbiotic quality that comes from the lovers’ mutual need and overlapping lust for things other than each other.

And yet Sweeney is studded with some of Sondheim’s finest love songs. Soaring, poignant melodies find their place unexpectedly in the midst of the gothic gloom, blooming briefly before darkness prevails. I distinctly remember being in the theater during the 2006 Broadway revival of the show, hearing for the first time the wondrous opening line of “Johanna,” and holding onto it like a lifeline, only to have it shift into something else entirely by the end of the song.

As such, the love songs in Sweeney come off less as declarations of devotion to a person than as plaintive pleas for justice in an unjust world. With Sweeney himself the most vengeful seeker of justice.

“My Friends:” Mr. Todd, Mrs. Lovett, and the Razors

It’s always a rich treat to watch Sondheim in action, teaching. Among other things, it validates the very enterprise of writing a blog about his works; they really are worth the close listen. To start, Sondheim teaches his student actor (and by extension his studio audience, and by further extension his 21st-century digital audience) that “My Friends” is in fact a love song. A crazed man to his razors.

This is the first of the love songs in Sweeney Todd, coming early in the first act, and it sets the tone for the kind of love that pervades this story. Sondheim tells his actor to sustain the song’s ritualistic quality, to use its rhythmic squareness to portray Sweeney’s state of “almost self-hypnosis.” Indeed, in this and other love songs throughout this show, there’s an element of determined fantasy, of willful wishing on the part of one lover for the other to take on a transportive greatness. Here, Sweeney bids his razor to “drip precious rubies” (gorgeous consonance in that phrase, the whispered s’s and the violent pop of the p’s) – to be his instrument of murder, and ultimately transport him to a place of vengeful justice.

This being Sondheim, “My Friends” has multiple layers of willful wishing, a love triangle masquerading as a duet, with a silver razor at its fulcrum. The third side is Mrs. Lovett, singing with comic banality, “I’m your friend, too, Mr. Todd.”

Mrs. Lovett’s opening solo, “Worst Pies in London,” introduces her as a pragmatist working to make ends meet in a dirty, unforgiving city. The hyperbole in the title is notable; it conveys Mrs. Lovett’s unflinching self-appraisal, her sense of humor, and, perhaps most notably though most subtly, her desire for the superlative. What she remembers of Sweeney from years back is his uncommon talent with a razor. If Mrs. Lovett makes the worst pies in London, Mr. Todd is the best barber in London, and it is for this reason that she’s kept his razors all these years, a detail that in a different context is the stuff of romance.

One might argue that what Mrs. Lovett wants through a relationship with Sweeney is simple companionship, escape from the struggle of the city, and a comfortable life, as she sings of in “By the Sea.”

I think she is too smart for that. Yes, she longs for an ocean breeze to brush away the depravities of the past. She wants the security of marriage (sneaking in a proposal to Sweeney between lines about kippered herring and seagulls squawking), and, more to the point, to get out of London before they both get caught. But she wants also to be in touch with greatness, even murderous greatness, and in doing so to reinvent herself. I think that Mrs. Lovett in these scenes with Sweeney is knowingly prosaic, and that she seeks not just a comfortable life, but a remarkable one.

Back to “My Friends” for a moment. Here’s a terrific George Ahearn, with Angela Lansbury in a role she seems born to play, from the 1982 Broadway production:

This staging and performance highlight the ebb and flow of Sweeney’s lunacy, with Mrs. Lovett’s patter (“silver’s good enough for me, Mr. Todd”) as the undercurrent. Sweeney tells his razors, “rest now, my friends” and starts to put them in their case. But a moment later, unable to stop himself, he seizes a razor and for the first time explicitly tells it – and Mrs. Lovett, and, perhaps, himself – that it will help him carry out murder. It’s the exultant sharing of secrets between two lovers. “At last, my arm is complete,” Sweeney roars. Mrs. Lovett looks on, the unplanned-for third wheel, shaken but already plotting ways to be useful.

Anthony and “Johanna”

The young, idealistic sailor and the golden-voiced woman locked in captivity. On this relationship, Sondheim lavishes the show’s most soaring melody paired with plainspoken, earnest lyric: “I feel you, Johanna. I feel you.”

It’s a gorgeous, shimmering phrase. The one that gave me lovely respite midway through the first act, a vision of a pure and good-hearted love.

Yet this love song, too, sings of fantasy – here a fallible and hubristic fantasy of rescue – and Sondheim tells us this musically. Note the unexpected interval in the phrase “satisfied enough to dream you,” the “dream” a step flatter and a beat longer than the ear wants to hear. Then the lyrics take a harder edge, once Anthony realizes what he’s up against and what he’ll need to resort to to consummate his love: “I’ll steal you, Johanna.” In that one line, delivered defiantly, Sondheim tells us that no one in this story, not the young idealist we were told to root for (and by extension, not even the complicit audience), will get by without resorting to vice.

Notably, “Johanna” is a one-voiced duet. Anthony sings of Johanna’s yellow hair, in part because he longs to bury himself in something soft and light and lovely, and in part because he knows nothing yet of the content of her soul. Johanna, like the razors in “My Friends,” is the silent projection of one man’s fantasy.

We don’t hear Johanna speak to Anthony until the astonishing, masterful “Kiss Me” later in the act.

“Sir, I did
Love you even as I
Saw you, even as it
Did not matter that I
Did not know your name…”

Like with “I feel you, Johanna,” Sondheim bestows Johanna’s declaration of love to Anthony with a sweet melody that soars above the nervous frenzy of their first rendezvous. But again, like in the earlier love song, Sondheim doesn’t resolve the phrase, leaves it lingering in a lower register on “did not know your name.” Upending the expectation of a happy ending to love-at-first-sight.

“Kiss Me” is not only about Johanna and Anthony’s love; it is about the judge’s lust for Johanna, and, as it reconnects the judge for the first time with Sweeney, it sets up the love song of Sweeney to Johanna that comes in “Johanna (Reprise)” in act two.

It’s worth noting that there’s yet another overture of ardor in “Kiss Me” – ever-so-tentative, laced with private fantasy – which is that of the judge’s assistant Beadle to his lord. A pleasing and halting melody as Beadle gently advises the judge on how to freshen his appearance before entering the lady’s bedroom. The difference is this one musically resolves: “You’ll dazzle the girl until / She bows to your every will.”

Sondheim plays with us in these moments of resolution. The stories we want to believe in (consummation of consensual love) never resolve musically, while those that we want to repel (an elder judge raping his young ward) get the most satisfying resolution. Which makes us as audience members unconsciously pulling for the wrong love stories, and Sondheim a genius of musical theater.

“Not While I’m Around:” Toby and Mrs. Lovett

Another love song of fantasy, and of upended tropes (the boy protecting the would-be mother, instead of the other way around). Here, I wonder if Toby’s fantasy is less about who he imagines Mrs. Lovett to be, and more about who he wishes himself to be. Somebody’s proper son. Deserving of maternal love, worthy of being protected and nurtured by someone who will let nothing harm him.

The melody here is a lilting lullaby. When Mrs. Lovett tries to take over to placate Toby, the orchestral strings turn discordant, and Toby interrupts her, once again leaving the story we’d like to believe in without resolution. It’s almost as if Toby himself can’t believe fully in the notion he casts of Mrs. Lovett, but lacks the option to believe in anything else.

“My Friends” ends with Sweeney’s declaration of murder. “Not While I’m Around” ends with something arguably more sinister and indisputably more base – Mrs. Lovett locking Toby in the basement, to lose his mind. At least Toby gets to resolve his final phrase, “not while I’m around,” before he truly isn’t.

By Marisa Suescun

In February, we put Colby, our dog of seven years, to sleep. The five days that preceded his death – the time after we decided to put him down and before the appointed day – were at once deeply melancholic and celebratory. We were mourning in advance the passing of our sweet and loyal (and unwell) friend, and also savoring him in the evanescent present – indulging him, attending to him, giving him a grand send off. Colby had chicken at every meal, extra tummy rubs, an extended romp chasing squirrels up trees in the backyard of my mother’s house. It was, to borrow a phrase, our quite literal moment in the woods.

“Who can live in the woods?” Sondheim’s cautionary line, delivered via the Baker’s Wife – a lesson she learns right before dying. Indeed. Among other things, it’s exhausting to constantly hold dual realities. But Sondheim knows also that there’s richness to plumb for those willing to go there, even for a moment, and this is the conviction of Into the Woods that most moves me.

One could argue that Into the Woods is about many things – the complicated nature of getting what you wish for, the evocative act of wishing itself, the subjective and self-appointed line between self-preserving and opportunist.

For me, it is most of all about the liminal. It is about the transitory in-between moments in life that undo us, that upend our beliefs or penetrate our core, and leave us on the other end a changed person in the same clothes. It is about the rare passage of time that we are prescient enough, not just after the fact but in the moment, to know to experience as a passage.

The liminal is at once a terrible and wonderful place in Into the Woods. This is perhaps most true for Jack, who contends not just with woods but a world at the top of a beanstalk that only he has witnessed.

Giants in the Sky (Jack)

If the woods give rise to a sexual awakening for Little Red Riding Hood (more on that later), for Jack the fantasies are of an outsized nurturer.

“And she gives you food and she gives you rest,
And she draws you close to her giant breast,
And you know things now that you never knew before.
Not ‘til the sky.”

The image of the lady giant drawing Jack to her breast contrasts with that of Jack’s own mother, a familiar figure seen from an unfamiliar height – “the roof, the house, and your mother at the door.” These are the two notions of motherhood that Jack must grapple with as he occupies the liminal space of the beanstalk – the ample, luminous, volatile sky mother and the economical, pragmatic, predictable earth mother. In the sky, the man giant comes to eat Jack for lunch, and Jack resorts to stealing and scrambling down the beanstalk. Down below, when starvation looms, Jack’s mother has him sell his scrawny, beloved cow for both more and much less than she’s worth – a theft of its own kind.

“And you think of all of the things you’ve seen
And you wish that you could live in between.
And you’re back again, only different than before.
After the sky.”

Jack, like so many characters in this play, wishes for the best of both worlds. He wants the exhilaration without the danger, a maternal tenderness that is also fiercely protective. The thrill of discovery before the inevitability of greed. (The dog, before the illness.) The earth and the sky.

I Know Things Now (Little Red Riding Hood)

I enjoy the clarity and earnestness of Eleanor Grant’s lovely rendition here. I wanted to find a good version of a child singing this song, as, like with Jack, the story of Little Red Riding Hood is a coming-of-age one.

Sondheim, in all his brilliance, draws wonderful musical and lyrical parallels between the two songs. Note that Little Red’s bridge, like Jack’s, has a crescendoing, stream-of-consciousness quality as she describes the frightening part of her transformative journey – in this case, being swallowed by the wolf. “But he drew me close, and he swallowed me down, down a dark slimy path…”

Little Red’s depiction of “when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever” echoes Jack’s recollection of the moment he fears being eaten by the giant – “and it’s then that you long for the things you’ve known, and the world you’ve left, and the little you own.”

Jack goes down to solid ground, and Little Red goes up “into the light, and we’re back to the start” (again, echoing Jack’s “and you’re back again, only different than before”) – at which point the music shifts to the original melody, in its tidy 4/ 4 time, and the lyrics shift back to the material world:

“And I know things now, many valuable things, that I hadn’t known before.
Do not put your faith in a cape and a hood; they will not protect you the way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers, even flowers have their dangers,
And though scary is exciting, nice is different than good.”

Like Jack, Little Red is contending with the complication of discovery, the way it casts contradictory shadows on previously clear paths. Three times in this song she speaks of the coupled emotions of “scary” and “exciting,” in the same way that Jack calls the giants “terrible” and “wonderful.” It’s a Sondheim trademark to expose the paradoxes inherent in growth, one reason his coming-of-age songs rarely descend into the hackneyed.

Still, young Little Red keeps striving, as we all do, to frame her experience neatly, to come at it from a place of understanding. While she starts off singing that she should have followed her mother’s advice to not stray from the path, she ends by celebrating the power, extolled by her Granny, to be brave and prepared for the unexpected.

“Now I know, don’t be scared.
Granny is right, just be prepared.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot?
And a little bit, not.”

I love how Sondehim gives her this little moment of youthful bravado in the penultimate line, followed by youthful vulnerability to close it out. Classic Sondheim – generous, unsentimental, and unmistakably apt.

On the Steps of the Palace (Cinderella)

Cinderella has perhaps the most overt – and overtly funny – defense of the liminal here, in this case the pitch-slathered steps of the palace. She is a character constantly seeking; she opens and closes the show with, “I wish.” In the first act, Cinderella spends much energy running to a ball to dance with a prince, and then equal energy running away when he pursues her.

“It’s your first big decision,
The choice isn’t easy to make.
To arrive at a ball is exciting and all;
Once you’re there, though, it’s scary.
And it’s fun to deceive
When you know you can leave,
But you have to be wary.”

Cinderella neither believes in herself as a princess, nor does she trust that to be the life that she really wants. The seeking of the fantasy – the enactment of “I wish” – is “exciting,” but the threat of actually living that fantasy is “scary.” The exact dichotomy Little Red grasps, though for different reasons, after her encounter with the wolf.

Cinderella is in the midst of one of those rare moments that you know to be pivotal in the moment. She tells herself to “stop and take stock while you’re standing here stuck on the steps of the palace” (the alliteration of the “st” blend here is delicious and witty and, to use a Sondheim term, apposite – it’s a restless, fitful sound). Yet she also knows her time to contemplate is fleeting; indeed, that inaction would actually signal startlingly decisive action, that of staying with the prince: “And whichever you pick, do it quick, ’cause you’re starting to stick to the steps of the palace.”

This is the thing about the liminal that Sondheim captures so aptly (and wittily) with Cinderella’s song. The window of time to linger in the in-between is by definition brief and ever waning, yet the possibilities are, for that enclosed moment, unusually expansive.

Cinderella is about to go home and “avoid the collision” when she realizes she could do something better:

“You know what your decision is,
Which is not to decide.
You’ll just leave him a clue.
For example, a shoe.
And then see what he’ll do.”

While Jack may wish that he could live in between, Cinderella, in a moment of clever inspiration, actually pulls it off. The prince has tried to checkmate her into a decision, and she coyly finds the unprotected escape route. Preserving “I wish” and “I have.” For the moment.

Moments in the Woods (Baker’s Wife)

Ah, the Baker’s Wife. (And ah, Joanna Gleason.) This is in my mind the most sophisticated of the liminal songs in Into the Woods. It is not an adolescent’s coming-of-age song, but a mature woman’s song of middle aging. With wit and spunk and grace.

One of the notable things about this song that often gets overlooked or understated (I think because the Baker’s Wife promptly dies after the song, a tragedy that does eschew a certain messiness of the mundane) is the fact that the Baker’s Wife gives a defense here of adultery. It is a nuanced, smart, and compassionate defense, and very decidedly a defense of a moment’s indulgence held contained in its place. The Baker’s Wife comes to a place at the end of the song where she feels that a little tumble in the woods with a prince won’t hurt her marriage – that, in fact, it would deepen it.

“Why not both instead?
There’s the answer, if you’re clever…
Must it always be either less or more, either plain or grand?
Is it always ‘or?’ Is it never ‘and?’
That’s what woods are for. For those moments in the woods.”

For the Baker’s Wife, the woods represent a departure from (though not a rejection of) her everyday world – a world she values and tenderly protects, even as she longs for the romance of the unfamiliar, of a mystery still to unfurl. In the first act, the Baker’s Wife relishes the changes she sees in her husband through their venture in the woods. She tells him, “You’ve changed, you’re daring, you’re different in the woods.” The couple indulges in their moment in the woods, a sweet, almost-shy courtship of sorts:

“We’ve changed. We’re strangers.
I’m meeting you in the woods.
Who minds? What dangers?
I know we’ll get past the woods.
And once we’re past,
Let’s hope the changes last.”

In Act One, the Baker’s Wife and her husband wish for the changes wrought by the liminal to carry forth into their shared everyday world. And it could be, if the curtain closes for good after Act One, “and happily ever after.”

Act Two is for the darker themes to emerge. In “Moments in the Woods,” the Baker’s Wife returns to this notion of a life marked by the momentous and unexpected – but comes to a different conclusion than her slightly younger self.

“Oh, if life were made of moments,
Even now and then a bad one.
But if life were only moments,
Then you’d never know you’d had one.”

There’s a likable pragmatism to the Baker’s Wife here. She indulges in a romantic, cinematic notion of life, and in the next breath waves her idea off as not only foolish but counterproductive. Like Cinderella, the Baker’s Wife notes both the thrill and danger in “get(ting) what you wish,” but unlike Cinderella, she doesn’t ultimately try to prolong her stay in the woods. If the young woman possesses the drive and spark to go after her wish, the mature woman possesses the wisdom to celebrate the act of wishing. More than a clever conceit that buys some time (leaving the one shoe), the Baker’s Wife has come upon an approach to living her life that allows her to cherish the “and” while sustaining (nourishing, deepening) the “or.” And so she takes decisive action, knowing precisely what to take with her and what to leave behind.

The sophistication, economy, and beauty of her final stanza brought tears to my eyes when I first heard it – mostly out of appreciation to share this earth with the brilliant and attentive soul that composed it. With a furry blond dog sleeping on the couch beside me, in his final few weeks of life.

“Let the moment go.
Don’t forget it for a moment, though.
Just remembering you’ve had an ‘and’
When you’re back to ‘or’
Makes the ‘or’ mean more
Than it did before.
Now I understand. And it’s time to leave the woods.”

By Marisa Suescun

I first encountered “Being Alive” on Broadway, during the 2006 revival of Company. Raul Esparza played Bobby, and his full-throated rendition of this song, which closes the musical, was one of its bright spots.

Raul Esparza
I enjoy Esparza’s growling treatment of “mock me with praise,” a standout line in a song Sondheim peppers with tropes. Bobby here could be speaking to the future lover he may finally let in, or to the Greek chorus of married friends who offer admiration and nettling in equal measure throughout the show. When Bobby blows out his birthday candles at the end of the show, it may be with a sigh of relief to have the chorus finally quiet down.

This show didn’t work for me (or many critics) entirely; the book and themes felt dated, and the actors-playing-instruments staging, done to such brilliant effect just a year earlier in the revival of Sweeny Todd, was clunky here. But Sondheim’s closing number is timeless, rousing, and well-served by someone who can belt.

Patti Lupone
This is the version on my iTunes. Lupone goes on a journey from vulnerable to triumphant, and the performance is enervating at every turn. “Vary my days,” she pleads, liltingly, before launching into her steady and powerful crescendo to the end.

Unlike most of Sondheim’s songs, “Being Alive” works better for me out of context, without the particulars of the show or character to color it. In James Lapine’s documentary Six by Sondheim, Sondheim describes his process of research for Company, a show about marriage – he talked with married people, as he himself was single at the time and content to be so. “Being Alive” does sound somewhat like an anthem to a theoretical idea, rather than a meditation on lived experience, which Sondheim does so exquisitely. “But alone/is alone,/ not alive.” It’s a surprisingly dichotomous statement from this composer, and one that doesn’t quite ring true for me.

Still, Lupone sells this line, and when I don’t know that it’s is coming from a man deciding in a sort of pop-psychology breakthrough that he wants in on marriage, then it takes me soaring along with it.

Neil Patrick Harris
This performance departs from most treatments of “Being A live,” and I like it a lot. Harris’ interpretation is wonderful and affecting. “Someone who, like it or not, / Will want you to share / A little, a lot.” Rather than give this line a hopeful, expectant tone, Harris imbues it with Bobby’s skepticism and pathos. Even in the transition when Bobby starts entreating, “Somebody, hold me too close,” it is with yearning, uncertainty, close-eyed vulnerability laid bare at last. And he treats the closing verse as a moment of reckoning – Harris’ Bobby at the end of “Being Alive” is at a place of departure, not the conventional triumphant arrival. It’s a lovely and wise piece of acting, and one that seems in tune with Sondheim’s sensibilities. Harris’ voice is nimble and expressive for the dramatic interpretation of this song, but at a certain point he can’t escape that it calls for someone who can belt, Broadway style, and the closing lines feel thin.

Dean Jones
This footage of the recording of the original Broadway cast was shown on Six by Sondheim. I enjoy the bit of Sondheim in this clip, talking about the “flower bursting” at the bridge (“Make me confused…”), and the “rhythmic liberties” he wants his singer to take there. Then we see Dean Jones with his sideburns and red turtleneck sweater, singing richly and melodically, flowering at the bridge, and building to an exultant conclusion. There’s a lack of nuance to Jones’ interpretation, but his singing is unimpeachable.